Electricity contract for an electric car: which tariff?

For a car charged at home, the right electricity contract comes down to hours first, not to the supplier. In Wallonia, the 2026 dual-rate tariff adds off-peak hours from 11 am to 5 pm. In Brussels and Flanders, nights and weekends remain the rule. A dynamic tariff only pays off with a charger that schedules itself.

Supplier or meter: which weighs more on the bill?

The meter and its time slots. A Belgian electricity bill has two layers: the energy price, set by the supplier in your contract, and the grid tariff, set by the distribution system operator (ORES, RESA, Sibelga, Fluvius) under the regional regulator's oversight. Single-rate, dual-rate and Wallonia's Impact tariff belong to the second layer. Changing supplier only touches the first.

A price check published by Selectra on 14 October 2026 makes the point. For a reference Brussels household (3,500 kWh a year, VAT included), three TotalEnergies offers sit between €1,541 and €1,567 a year. Of the €1,541 for the myDrive offer, €493 goes to the grid and €282 to taxes and levies: €775, or 50.3% of the bill (our own calculation), which the choice of contract does not move by a single euro.

A €26 gap.

That is small next to what a charge started at the wrong time costs. An electric car adds about 2,800 kWh a year to household consumption for 15,000 km (17 kWh per 100 km, plus 10% charging losses), and those kilowatt-hours have a rare quality in a home: you get to choose when you use them.

What are the off-peak hours in 2026, region by region?

They are no longer the same everywhere. The CWaPE moved Wallonia's dual-rate slots on 1 January 2026, while Sibelga keeps its historical slots in Brussels. I counted the cheap hours per week and the room they leave for a daily charge of 7.7 kWh (2,800 kWh divided by 365 days).

Hours checked on 17 October 2026 with the CWaPE and Sibelga. In Flanders, check the slot on your bill: some municipalities start an hour earlier.

The day's charge fits into any of these windows. At 3.7 kW, the output of a 16 A single-phase charger, 7.7 kWh takes just over two hours. Even the Impact tariff's ECO night, only six hours long, offers 22 kWh at that power, three times the daily need.

The trap lies in the start time.

Is dual-rate still worth it with an electric car?

Yes, in almost every case. According to Test-Achats (25 November 2025), ORES reckons dual-rate often becomes the better deal once a quarter of annual consumption falls in off-peak hours. A car charged overnight tips a large share of the bill onto the right side on its own.

Wallonia has, however, changed a habit many drivers had picked up without thinking: Saturday morning is no longer off-peak, and neither is Sunday evening between 5 pm and 10 pm. Someone who plugged in after the Saturday shopping at 10 am now pays the full rate. In exchange, the afternoon from 11 am to 5 pm has become off-peak every day, which suits people who work from home or whose car stays parked at home during the week.

In Brussels, where I live, nothing moved this year.

Who gains from Wallonia's Impact tariff?

Households that shift a lot of consumption and schedule it. The Impact tariff splits the day into three grid prices: ECO from 1 am to 7 am and from 11 am to 5 pm, MEDIUM from 7 am to 11 am and from 10 pm to 1 am, PEAK from 5 pm to 10 pm. According to Test-Achats, MEDIUM costs three times the ECO rate and PEAK five times.

The CWaPE simulated the distribution part alone for a Walloon household with an electric car using 7,380 kWh a year:

Source: CWaPE simulation reported by Test-Achats on 25 November 2025. Energy, taxes and VAT come on top.

From single rate to a well-used Impact tariff, the gap reaches €320 a year, or 39% of distribution costs (our own calculation). One detail stopped me when I redid the sums: the two Walloon tariffs do not start at the same hour. On dual-rate, overnight charging can begin at 10 pm. On the Impact tariff, 10 pm to 1 am is still MEDIUM, at three times the ECO price. A charger left on a 10 pm start out of habit loses most of the benefit.

Worse: plugged in at 6 pm with no schedule, a car taking 7.7 kWh at 7.4 kW does its whole charge in just over an hour, right in the PEAK slot.

Two more caveats. The Impact tariff requires a communicating meter with its communication function switched on. And Test-Achats currently advises against it for solar panel owners who still benefit from the meter that runs backwards, since no commercial offer is yet matched to the three slots.

Is a dynamic contract worth it for charging?

Only if something picks the hours for you. With a dynamic contract, the energy price follows the next day's Belgian power exchange, hour by hour, and quarter-hour by quarter-hour since 1 October 2025. Prices generally drop between noon and 5 pm, when solar is plentiful, and at night.

Access conditions are strict: a smart meter, and consent for the grid operator to pass your quarter-hourly data to the supplier. Any supplier with more than 200,000 customers must offer such a contract. Test-Achats counts around thirty in Flanders, where Engie launched the first one in 2021; in Wallonia and Brussels, they have only been available since 2025.

In Brussels, the door stays narrow for a practical reason: according to Brugel, 172,437 smart meters were installed on 17 April 2026, or 23.81% of all meters.

My view is firm. Without a connected charger or an app that starts charging at the right quarter-hour, a dynamic contract exposes you to evening price peaks and gives nothing back. Eneco, Engie, Frank Energie and Luminus offer, according to Test-Achats, an app that automatically charges the car during the cheapest hours. That app is what makes the contract pay.

Are offers reserved for electric cars any better?

Not automatically. TotalEnergies, for example, sells myDrive, a three-year variable contract reserved for customers who own an electric car, with a night rate presented as advantageous. For the reference Brussels household, it comes to €1,541 a year, against €1,561 for the myEssential variable contract and €1,567 for the myDynamic dynamic contract from the same supplier (Selectra check of 14 October 2026).

That budget is calculated on a standard profile. Yours, with 2,800 kWh of charging almost all done at night, looks nothing like it: redo the sums with your real day and night split before signing up for three years.

In Flanders, dual-rate does not shield you from the capacity tariff

Charging at night takes care of the price per kilowatt-hour, not of the peak. Since 2023, Fluvius has billed part of the grid cost on your monthly peak power, and an 11 kW charger started at 10 pm pushes it up just as it would in daytime. The calculation and the fixes are in our article on the capacity tariff in Flanders.

Five mistakes that cost money on the bill

• Letting the charger start as soon as it is plugged in, at 6 pm, when the grid is most expensive in all three regions.
• Keeping a 10 pm start time after moving to Wallonia's Impact tariff, when ECO hours only begin at 1 am.
• Carrying on charging on Saturday mornings in Wallonia, as before 2026.
• Signing a dynamic contract without a controllable charger, relying on memory to plug in at the right time.
• Comparing suppliers before checking your meter: a single-rate meter makes any "night" offer pointless.

How do you compare offers without getting it wrong?

With your region's official tool and your own consumption. CompaCWaPE in Wallonia, BruSim in Brussels and V-test in Flanders compare suppliers based on your address and your meter; the CREG, the federal regulator, offers the CREG Scan nationwide. These tools only compare the energy part of the bill and do not account for promotions.

Start from your last twelve months of readings, add the estimated charging, and enter the share actually used off-peak. If you are still weighing up the charger itself, our guide to installing a home charger covers the options, and the article on home charging costs prices the kilometre by region. With solar panels, read our guide on solar charging first.

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